Ancient Greeks swore one Homer; scholars doubt the biography
Homer is the traditional name for the poet of the Iliad and Odyssey, often placed around the eighth century BC. The Iliad stages Achilles’ quarrel with Agamemnon; the Odyssey follows Odysseus’s ten-year return. Plato said Homer educated Greece—yet modern scholarship treats a single author as likely fiction.
The epics were probably composed in the late eighth or early seventh century BC, and poets such as Archilochus, Alcman, Tyrtaeus and Callinus already echo them in the seventh. Ancient biographies mostly made him a blind singer from Ionia; others gave him a Muse, Apollo or even Telemachus as ancestor, and Pindar tied him to Chios and Smyrna. Alcaeus of Messene’s epigrams bury him on Ios. Antiquity also credited him with the Homeric Hymns, the mock-epic Frog–Mouse War and much else, attributions no longer accepted.
Criticism has swung widely. Renaissance humanists, after Demetrios Chalkokondyles printed the first edition in Florence in 1488, read him as a sage hiding wisdom in allegory. In 1664 the abbé d’Aubignac denounced the poems as incoherent patchworks and denied Homer existed; Richard Bentley kept an obscure oral poet, and Giambattista Vico in 1744 turned Homer into an idea, the Greeks themselves singing their history.
Friedrich August Wolf’s 1795 Prolegomena argued that short oral songs from the tenth century BC circulated for about four hundred years before literate editors stitched them together in the sixth. His Analyst followers split over whether the epics grew from many small lays or around a central core, but the school faded after the First World War.
From about 1928 Milman Parry and Albert Lord, studying Balkan folk singers, showed how bards improvise with stock epithets and formulas. Their oral-formulaic theory won wide acceptance and explained the poems’ archaic language and repeated phrases, leaving the lone genius of legend looking more like the voice of a tradition.
Source: Homer
